Menu

Graduate Seminar on the History of Philanthropy

Editors’ Note: Prompted by an emailed request from University of Minnesota doctoral student Reba Juetten, I have updated a syllabus on the history of philanthropy that I drafted in 2015 and whose introduction I include on my personal website. Never used, it has remained a dream course that I would love to teach one day. With HistPhil readers’ knowledge of the field in mind (and so too other graduate students who might look to HistPhil for reading list recommendations), I am posting the syllabus below. Please criticize and improve upon the document. Though I have updated it this morning to include books published since 2015, I likely have missed some texts. In this vein, please comment on themes that I have missed or should have elaborated upon. Also please reach out to us via email or Twitter with other syllabi recommendations.

-Maribel Morey, HistPhil co-editor.

History of U.S. Philanthropy Graduate Seminar

Professor Maribel Morey

In 1996, nineteenth-century U.S. historian Sven Beckert proposed an undergraduate seminar on the history of American capitalism at Harvard. Seventeen years later in 2013, The New York Times announced that the “events of 2008 and their long aftermath have given urgency to the scholarly realization that it really is the economy, stupid.” Today, the history of capitalism has become a trending focus in history departments across the country, with course offerings and completed dissertations on the topic. U.S. historians’ contemporary excitement about capitalism as an analytic lens for understanding change-over-time within the United States, though, co-exists with another movement within the field: to transnationalize, or rather, to globalize U.S. history. Sure enough, U.S. historians of capitalism have blended these two movements to write transnational, global histories of capitalism.

However, if we, as U.S. historians, want to understand how and why capitalism functions the way it does within and outside the United States and want to understand the role of the United States in a global community throughout the past centuries, then we also need to take into account U.S. philanthropy. This is because philanthropy plays the role of addressing and also legitimizing the inequalities produced by capitalism, and it plays this role both domestically and globally.

In this graduate seminar, we will examine the complex role of U.S. philanthropy in American democratic life and on the global stage. In doing so, we not only will be enriching two contemporary trends in the profession, but continuing an intellectual tradition developed nearly forty years ago by University of Chicago historians Barry D. Karl and Stanley N. Katz.

We will begin the seminar by analyzing how philanthropists, philanthropic managers, national policymakers, and the American public perceived the role of U.S. philanthropy in the United States and globally throughout the long twentieth century. After discussing key secondary works in the field, we will analyze Andrew Carnegie’s distinction between charity and philanthropy and the role he prescribed to philanthropy in a capitalist society. Moving forward chronologically into the 1920s and 1930s United States, we will analyze how Americans discussed the appropriate forms of philanthropy-government collaborations; the ideal relationships among foundations; and, the power of philanthropies to shape the construction of authoritative knowledge in the natural and social sciences. Next, we will read the various Congressional investigations of these organizations throughout the twentieth century as a means of understanding Americans’ changing anxieties about philanthropy and U.S. democracy. We then will discuss the role of U.S. foundations on a global stage during the twentieth century and analyze these organizations’ shifting identities as benevolent givers; empire by another name; and, apologists for global capitalism. We will conclude the course with a general reflection on the place of U.S. philanthropy in the global community during the long twentieth century and today.

Course Expectations:

Class Engagement: For each class session, students should arrive with discussion questions on the readings and they should be prepared to take leading roles in posing and discussing questions about the readings. This form of engaged class participation will count for fifty percent of the student’s grade in the course. To keep track of the course material, it is advisable to maintain a log of the timeline, subject, and argument of each reading. These notes will become useful when thinking about and drafting the final paper.

Final Paper: This final paper can be either a historiographical essay or a piece of original historical research that incorporates both primary and secondary literature. In either case, the final paper should be 20-25 pages in length. Please consult with me throughout the semester, so that we can exchange ideas on sources, research focus, argument, etc.

Beyond our seminar: There are humanists, social scientists, and leaders in the non-profit world who are interested in the history of philanthropy. So, feel free to expand on our seminar discussions and engage with them. Here are a few ways to do so:

Fellow historians of philanthropy Stanley N. Katz, Benjamin Soskis, and I edit this blog. The general idea of the blog is to bring together scholars, foundation leaders, and philanthropists in common dialogue on the past, present, and future of philanthropy. Lending a critical lens to scholarly work on the history of philanthropy and to contemporary philanthropic practice, we envision contributors exploring the role and impact of philanthropy in different societies across the globe during the past centuries. We invite you to share your work in this class with the blog’s community at the end of the semester. Of course, if you have story ideas in the meantime, please feel free to share them with me after class or via email.

Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890, reprinted: Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Ajay K. Mehrotra, Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929 (NYC: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Judith Sealander, Private Wealth & Public Life: Foundation Philanthropy and the Reshaping of American Society from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Seminar 5: A Color Line in How the Money Flowed

Readings for Today:

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

Part IV. Congressional Investigations on Foundations in Twentieth Century United States:

Seminar 11: The Walsh Commission on Industrial Relations, 1912-1915

Readings for Today:

Henry S. Pritchett, “Should the Carnegie Foundation Be Suppressed?” The North American Review 201 (Apr., 1915).

Eleanor K. Taylor, “The Public Accountability of Charitable Trusts and Foundations: Historical Definition of the Problem in the United States,” Social Service Review 25 (Sept., 1951).

Extra Reading:

John T. Flynn, God’s Gold: The Story of Rockefeller and His Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935).

Seminar 12: The Cox, Reece, and Patman Committees (1950s-1960s)

Readings for Today:

Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate Foundations and Other Organizations (Cox Committee Report). U.S. House of Representatives, 82nd Congress, 2nd, Report No. 2514 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1953).

Foundations Under Fire: A Selection of Writings by Critics and Supporters of Tax-Exempt Foundations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970).

Alice O’Connor, “The Politics of Rich and Poor: Postwar Investigations of Foundations and the Rise of the Philanthropic Right,” in American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (ed., Nelson Lichtenstein) (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

Extra Reading:

Paul Arnsberger, et. al., “A History of the Tax-Exempt Sector: An SOI Perspective,” Statistics of Income Bulletin (Winter 2008).

Seminar 14: U.S. Philanthropy and Democracy in the United States

Readings for Today:

Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).